Monsoon induced seasonality in the recruitment of Philippine fishes

Abstract

The patterns of recruitment of 112 stocks of Philippine teleost fishes, from 23 families, 34 genera and 57 species, have been studied in detail. The annual recruitment patterns, which were obtained by the backward projection onto their time axis of length-frequency data from about 0.9 million measurements made between 1958 and 1981, generally show a bimodel structure with two peaks of unequal strength four and eight months apart. It is shown taht this periodicity corresponds to that of the seasonal monsoonal wind patterns in the Philippines.